5 APR 2026

Day 95

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.

Shunryu Suzuki · Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

A large wave curls forward in a spiral, its crest breaking into foam that reaches toward three low boats. Mount Fuji appears small and pale in the distance, framed by the curve of the wave. The composition is printed in Prussian blue, grey, and pale yellow.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa

Japanese · 1830 · Paper, Prussian blue

Hokusai's wave was not painted once. It was carved in wood, inked, and printed — a different impression each time, none quite identical, all from the same set of blocks.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Speech Recognition and Synthesis

Systems and judgement · Weak supervision and self-supervised pre-training · Hundreds of thousands of hours of audio

A speech model trained on hundreds of thousands of hours transcribes reliably without being told which audio matches which text — but given silence, it invents words never spoken.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

A white canvas divided by black lines of varying thickness into rectangles. A red rectangle fills the lower right corner, a blue rectangle sits at the top left, and a small yellow block appears at the lower left.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Mondrian's Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow

Piet Mondrian · 1930 · Oil on canvas

Mondrian moved strips of coloured tape across a white canvas for weeks before committing to paint. The result looks immediate, but the archive shows hesitation in every placement.

Enter lesson 6 MIN