Recent Notes
View allAs Rilke says, there are no classes for beginners in life, the most difficult thing is always asked of one right away.
Objects have their shape and weight, their color, and beyond this a dimension for which there is no scale, their importa…
Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, bu…
Some thoughts a few chapters in: - the prose is so lyrical. there is no connective tissue, it's all jump cuts. no establ…
Do you know the word otium in Latin, meaning, “doing nothing”? The Roman people were all laid back. In all the pictures,…
“a theory of good judgment”: self-critical thinkers are better at figuring out the contradictory dynamics of evolving si…
"Go work in an industry where the founders of that industry are still working"
"what do you do when you’ve captured your objective, only to find it abandoned and bad weather on the way" Napoleon in…
“The test of a good theory lies in its ability to explain the past, for only if it does can we trust what it may tell us…
“But Xerxes failed to establish a proper relationship between his ends and his means. Because ends exist only in the ima…
He could have warned Xerxes of the depleted rivers, hungry lions, sudden squalls, resentful locals, fierce fighters, cry…
The tragedy of Xerxes and Artabanus is that each lacked the other’s proficiency. Xerxes was right. If you try to antici…
Scott Fitzgerald’s test for a first-rate intelligence: "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same ti…
When Thaddeus Stevens asks the president how he can reconcile so noble an aim with such malodorous methods, Lincoln reca…
Two of the very best ways to become intellectually indelible: The first is to be Delphic, a trick known to oracles throu…
“You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. ”
"It was as if he were a dead man animated by nothing more than a habit of stubborn will. Yet he was oddly aware of himse…
- Every new technology gets greeted with a moral panic: it's going to ruin society, ruin morality, and especially ruin t…
"There will be tons of businesses out there that are going to want an opinionated solution to help them solve real probl…
- Bryant spent years in a visual builder at Webflow, so his instinct was that Ploy needed a panel to drag and drop, resi…
July 2026
Rick Rubin, the producer behind everyone from Run-DMC to Johnny Cash, reveals why he's a "lazy workaholic" who forces himself to show up every day just to wait for magic—and how stripping everything down to essence has been his only method for 40 years.
The first benchmark that evaluates AI video generation not just on technical quality of individual clips, but on whether agents can maintain narrative coherence, cinematic language, and emotional impact across complete minute-long videos with multiple scenes.
Frontier AI models got $100, a song, and full autonomy to research video generators, create clips, and edit a music video—revealing where tool use diverges and creative judgment still fails.
De-lighting lets you see 3D VFX elements integrated with live-action footage directly in your viewport—no rendering or compositing required—by using a clever mathematical trick to remove and replace lighting information.
Switching Ploy's production agent from Claude Opus to GPT-5.6 revealed that "the model" is actually a stack of provider-specific behaviors—tool-calling conventions, cache architectures, reasoning replay—that your system has invisibly specialized around, requiring surgical fixes at every layer.
A forensic breakdown of what happens in the 2-3 seconds between scanning a UPI QR code and seeing the green tick—through seven separate organizations that move 22.7 billion payments a month, where your app never touches your money and the system is designed to fail in your favor.
When AI commoditizes problem-solving, your career becomes the ungradeable parts: choosing what to build, judging if it's good, and finishing past where the machine stops.
Anthropic discovered Claude spontaneously developed an internal "mental workspace" that mirrors human conscious access—a structure they never designed, suggesting it's a general solution intelligent systems converge on, not just a quirk of biology.
Most monitoring systems calculate p99 metrics and store them in time series databases, then average those values when resampling—which is mathematically meaningless, because you can't average percentiles without the original population of events.
A Bell Labs legend's brutally honest framework on why most scientists waste their careers on unimportant problems, and the specific traits and behaviors that separate those who do great work from those who become footnotes in history.
Brunello Cucinelli runs a publicly traded luxury company with no emails after 5:30 PM, mandatory rest, and 20% higher wages - proving you can build a €356M business by rejecting hustle culture and treating capitalism as a humanistic practice.
AI companies are paying $320K-$400K for editorial roles because as products converge technically, storytelling has become the primary way to turn capability into market conviction—and the companies restructuring around it are winning.
Prompt caching isn't just an optimization for AI agents—it's the fundamental infrastructure that makes long-running agentic products like Claude Code economically feasible at all.
June 2026
Bryant Chou (Webflow co-founder) explains why AI is creating a renaissance for experienced founders who can now "clone themselves" 400-1000x and go directly to the right part of the idea maze—turning domain expertise into an unfair advantage.
A developer pointed a pure-Go git implementation at object storage and built a stateless git server with no filesystem, no git binary, and no database—then had to fix the thousand ways filesystems lie to us about latency.
An independent AI lab built a top-10 text-to-image model from scratch—including custom data infrastructure processing 208TB of metadata, a PostgreSQL-based queue system, and a training pipeline explicitly optimized for creative exploration over aesthetic convergence.
Tech spent 40 years building trust as humble, product-obsessed nerds, then liquidated it all for attention—and the Founders Fund Mafia video shows we're about to find out the real cost of buying that trust back.
Marc Andreessen explains why founders should run companies (not managers), how he designed A16z by studying Hollywood talent agencies and investment banks, and why Elon Musk's management method—fixing production bottlenecks weekly through 120 daily design reviews—represents an entirely new school of leadership that bridges creativity with systematic execution.
Palantir co-founder Stephen Cohen argues that the future of computing isn't replacing humans but enabling the qualitative reasoning machines can't replicate—and shares how he learned entrepreneurship requires "worldly wisdom" that institutions can't teach.
An autonomous AI security agent found 21 zero-days in FFmpeg—including bugs that sat latent for 20+ years—after intensive audits by Google and Anthropic missed them, producing actual RCE exploits for $1k instead of theoretical reports.