17 MAR 2026

Day 76

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman · Cargo Cult Science

A seated bronze cat with gold earrings, nose rings, and a winged scarab pectoral, facing forward with upright posture and alert expression. Silver-inlaid eyes and detailed surface carving.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Gayer-Anderson Cat

Late Period Egypt · c. 664–332 BC · Bronze, gold, silver

A cat cast in bronze and dressed in gold rings and a scarab pendant, then given to a temple and never touched again. Modern X-rays revealed how much of what you see is twentieth-century repair.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Bandwidth, Not FLOPs

Hardware and local inference · Memory bandwidth · Weight loading, not matrix multiplication

A modern GPU can perform trillions of operations per second, yet generate only tens of tokens. The bottleneck is not arithmetic — it is how fast the chip can read its own memory.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

Two folding screens showing pale grey pine trees emerging from mist. Most of the paper is blank white. The trees fade in and out, with no ground or sky, only gradations of fog.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Hasegawa Tōhaku's Pine Trees

Hasegawa Tōhaku · Late 16th century · Ink on paper, folding screens

Hasegawa Tōhaku covered a pair of six-panel screens with mist so pale that most of the paper was left bare. The trees appear and vanish not despite the emptiness but because of it.

Enter lesson 6 MIN