1 MAR 2026

Day 60

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

William Faulkner · Requiem for a Nun

A standing bronze figure of Tara, nearly life-size, with one hip shifted in a relaxed posture. She wears elaborate jewellery and a tall crown, with traces of gold gilding visible across the dark bronze surface.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Statue of Tara

Sri Lankan · 9th century · Bronze with gilding

A ninth-century bronze goddess, gilded and cast at near-human height, spent much of the twentieth century in museum storage because Victorian trustees considered her nudity unsuitable for public display.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

LoRA and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Training and alignment · 2021 (LoRA), 2023 (QLoRA) · Hu et al. (Microsoft), Dettmers et al.

A base model holds billions of parameters. LoRA lets you fine-tune it by training a pair of much smaller matrices that sit alongside the frozen weights, making adaptation cheap enough for a single GPU.

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Painted manuscript page showing figures in robes and turbans, some seated, some standing, with text in Arabic script above and below the image.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Al-Wasiti's Maqamat al-Hariri

Abbasid Baghdad · 1237 · Ink and pigment on paper

A con artist, a narrator and a caravan crossing the page. Baghdad in 1237 produced one of the few surviving manuscripts where Arabic literature and observational painting met on equal terms.

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