18 MAR 2026

Day 77

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

Douglas Adams · Mostly Harmless

A manuscript page with text in Persian script above and below a rectangular painting. The painting shows figures in brightly coloured robes and turbans, some on horseback, arranged vertically against a ground that tilts upward. Gold leaf in the sky and details.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

A Folio from the Shahnameh

Safavid Persian · c. 977–1010 CE · 16th century

Fifty thousand couplets, thirty-three years of work, one poet's wager that verse could preserve a culture through conquest. This painted page is a window into how later centuries saw his achievement.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Unified Memory

Hardware and local inference · Apple Silicon M-series and later · Shared address space between CPU and GPU

A MacBook with 192 GB of RAM can load a model that would not fit on any consumer graphics card — because the GPU and CPU share the same physical memory.

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A large canvas filled with overlapping areas of bright colour and black lines. A dark oval sits left of centre, surrounded by swirls of yellow, red, blue, pink and green. Black lines cross the surface in gestural arcs.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Kandinsky's Composition VII

Wassily Kandinsky · 1913 · Oil on canvas

Kandinsky claimed this canvas came to him in a rush of spiritual vision. The preparatory drawings tell a different story: thirty-one studies over six months, each testing a different arrangement of colour and line.

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