28 FEB 2026

Day 59

It is not what you look at that matters, it is what you see.

Henry David Thoreau · Journal

An elongated bark shield, dark and weathered, with a puncture hole visible near one edge.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Gweagal Shield

Gweagal / Dharawal · attributed to 29 April 1770 · Bark

A shield with a puncture through it, held in London, attributed to the moment Cook's party landed. The hole's cause, the shield's origin, and its rightful home are all disputed.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Training Against Written Principles

Training and alignment · Constitutional AI · Bai et al.

Write down your principles as a numbered list, then ask the model to criticise its own drafts against them. The revised outputs become training data, and no human needs to label thousands of examples.

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A night sky filled with swirling clouds and bright stars above a village with a prominent church spire, dark hills behind, and a tall cypress tree rising in the foreground on the left.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Van Gogh's The Starry Night

Vincent van Gogh · 1889 · Oil on canvas

Van Gogh painted the view from his window at Saint-Rémy, then replaced the actual landscape with an invented village and a sky whose turbulence has since been compared to patterns in fluid dynamics.

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