25 MAR 2026

Day 84

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

Alan Perlis · Epigrams on Programming

A covered gold cup with a tall stem, decorated with translucent enamel in red, blue, green and white showing narrative scenes, with pearls set around the foot.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Royal Gold Cup

French Gothic · 14th century · Gold with enamel and pearls

Solid gold, enamelled in translucent red that should have been impossible to preserve, and owned in turn by French kings, English monarchs, and Spanish Habsburgs before a sale brought it to London.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

A Cluster of Personal Computers

Hardware and local inference · Pipeline and tensor · Seconds per token, not milliseconds

A single graphics card cannot hold a seventy-billion-parameter model. But three older ones, linked over Ethernet, sometimes can — if you are willing to wait between words.

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A manuscript page with parallel columns of text in Nahuatl and Spanish, with an illustration showing figures in indigenous dress rendered with European shading techniques and Nahua glyphs marking names and places.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Florentine Codex

1575 · Nahua, compiled under Spanish direction · Ink and pigment on paper

Nahua writers and artists documented their own culture in parallel Nahuatl and Spanish columns. The columns tell the same story differently, and the differences are not accidental.

Enter lesson 7 MIN