23 MAR 2026

Day 82

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Pablo Picasso · Interview with William Fifield

A section of tanned hide decorated with dyed porcupine quills stitched in geometric bands of red, yellow, black, and white, forming triangles and parallel lines.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Plains Quillwork

Plains Nations · Pre-contact to present · Porcupine quills, hide, sinew

Before glass beads arrived from Europe, Plains nations stitched geometric patterns with porcupine quills — dyed, softened, flattened between the teeth, and sewn through leather in techniques that took years to learn.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Why Long Context Eats Your RAM

Hardware and local inference · Attention mechanisms, transformer architecture

A 7-billion-parameter model serving one 128k-token context can need 80 gigabytes just for the key-value cache — five times the memory used by the weights themselves.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

A long sandstone gallery wall densely carved with rows of figures in low relief, depicting gods and demons pulling on a serpent in a continuous narrative scene.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Bas-Reliefs of Angkor Wat

Khmer Empire · 12th century, with later additions · Sandstone

The galleries of Angkor Wat hold relief scenes that run the length of eight football pitches. Some panels were finished centuries after the temple was built, and you can still see where.

Enter lesson 7 MIN