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The Daily Triptych094 / 365

4 APR 2026

Day 94

It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.

Henri Poincaré · Science and Method
A woodcut print of a rhinoceros shown in profile, its body covered in overlapping armoured plates with rivet-like markings, a small twisted horn on its shoulder, scaly legs, and serrated rear haunches.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Dürer's Rhinoceros

Albrecht Dürer · 1515 · Woodcut on laid paper

Dürer worked from a sketch and letter describing an animal unseen in Europe for centuries. He added rivets, extra horns and armour plates — his version became the rhinoceros for three hundred years.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Diffusion and Image Generation

Systems and judgement · Ho et al., 2020; Rombach et al., 2022 · Learned denoising

Language models predict the next token. Diffusion models do something entirely different: they learn to clean up a noisy image, then generate by reversing that process from pure static.

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A wooden bridge crosses diagonally through the frame under a heavy rain, drawn as fine parallel lines. Figures with umbrellas hurry across. The far shore is a dark, flat band.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Hiroshige's Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge

Utagawa Hiroshige · 1856 · Woodblock print

Hiroshige carved the rain as parallel incisions in a separate woodblock, then printed them over the entire scene. Van Gogh copied the print in oil and could not make the rain work the same way.

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