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The Daily Triptych098 / 365

8 APR 2026

Day 98

We do not learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience.

John Dewey · How We Think
A greenish glass cup with openwork decoration showing figures in relief, mounted on a bronze base. The glass appears translucent with a jade-like surface tone.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Lycurgus Cup

Roman · 4th century · Dichroic glass, silver

Green when you stand before it, red when light shines through from behind. Roman glassmakers made it work without knowing that gold and silver nanoparticles were the reason.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Bias, Harm and Safety Training

Systems and judgement · Reinforcement learning from human or AI feedback · Constitutional AI (Bai et al., 2022)

A model trained to refuse harmful requests still carries the same statistical patterns it learned from text. Alignment moves the likely outputs; it does not rewrite the weights.

Enter lesson 7 MIN
A painted portrait on wood showing a young person with large dark eyes, curly dark hair, and pale skin, gazing directly forward. Gold jewellery is visible at the neck.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Fayum Mummy Portraits

Romano-Egyptian · 1st–3rd century AD · Encaustic and tempera on wood

Real faces painted in hot wax, wrapped into linen and buried in Egyptian sand. They look at you as though you had just walked into the room two thousand years ago.

Enter lesson 6 MIN