Encounter with Picasso's Kitchen

July 9, 2026

art painting modernism

Picasso's 1948 painting "The Kitchen." Flat angular lines cover and intersect a beige surface. They could be figures or birds or I guess parts of a kitchen

On MoMA's 5th floor the other day, the painting I responded to most viscerally was this Picasso, "The Kitchen." On a screen it's just one more rectangle among all the rectangles we encounter, mediated by screens, throughout every day: the …

LLMS' alien linguistic parsing

June 18, 2026

language AI

Vilhelm Hammershoi's 1901 painting, "Room in Strandgade with Sunshine on the Floor." A quiet, minimal parlor. A woman sits at a modest wooden chair and table in the left side of the canvas, facing awa

I think anyone who's translated, or even studied a language with different word order than their native language, will have an intuitive grasp of the benefit of self-attention as opposed to sequentially interpreting a text word by word. A simple …