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The Daily Triptych086 / 365

27 MAR 2026

Day 86

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

Albert Einstein · Physics and Reality
A carved limestone relief showing a bearded, winged figure in profile, wearing a fringed robe and holding a small bucket in one hand and a cone-shaped object in the other, facing toward a stylised tree.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Ashurnasirpal II Palace Reliefs

Neo-Assyrian · 883–859 BC · Nimrud, ancient Kalhu

A bearded figure in profile, bucket in one hand and pine cone in the other, carved into limestone and repeated down a corridor. The gesture was ritual purification, and originally the stone was painted.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Embedding Models

Systems and judgement · Encoder-only transformers, often smaller than generative models · Contrastive learning on sentence pairs

A generative model's internal embeddings are trained to predict the next word. That makes them poor at judging whether two sentences mean the same thing, so we train different models for that task.

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A black quadrilateral, slightly irregular, on a white painted ground. The surface is covered with fine cracks.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Malevich's Black Square

Kazimir Malevich · 1915 · Oil on canvas

Malevich painted a black square on white canvas in 1915 and hung it in the corner of the room where a Russian Orthodox home would place its holiest image.

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