Notes

“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 himself and of the places, persons, and events which moved past him in these few days; and he knew that he presented to the public regard an appearance which belied his condition. He taught his classes, he greeted his colleagues, he attended the meetings he had to attend--and no one of the people he met from day to day knew that anything was wrong.

But from the moment he walked out of Gordon Finch's office, he knew, somewhere within the numbness that grew from a small center of his being, that a part of his life was over, that a part of him was so near death that he could watch the approach almost with calm. He was vaguely conscious that he walked across the campus in the bright crisp heat of an early spring afternoon; the dogwood trees along the sidewalks and in the front yards were in full bloom, and they trembled like soft clouds, translucent and tenuous, before his gaze; the sweet scent of dying lilac blossoms drenched the air."

• Every new technology gets greeted with a moral panic: it's going to ruin society, ruin morality, and especially ruin the children. The bicycle was pre-feminism, so it was also going to ruin the women.
• The bicycle rolled out around 1870–1880, when towns were scattered 5, 10, or 15 miles apart and people didn't walk that far. Suddenly it was easy to ride five miles to the next town. Young people realized there were other young people one town over they didn't grow up with, and they headed out.
• Young women taking up the bicycle was the real threat. If the attractive young women in your town are riding over the hill to the next town, that's a problem for the young men.
• So the press invented "bicycle face." The lecture to young women was that exerting yourself on a bicycle makes an exertion face, and do it too much and your face freezes that way permanently.
• The payoff of the scare: with a permanent bicycle face, you'd never find a husband.

"There will be tons of businesses out there that are going to want an opinionated solution to help them solve real problems for the things that really matter to them. The way I think about it is that these underlying models, they're really good at a lot of different things. They're general purpose. And I think there's just going to be a big need for something that is purpose-built to help a customer achieve an outcome. And that's where products, even pure SaaS products, still have a right to really explore that and to really leverage the model capabilities to benefit the end customers."

• Bryant spent years in a visual builder at Webflow, so his instinct was that Ploy needed a panel to drag and drop, resize elements, and control the flow. The team stressed about how to bring that visual tooling into Ploy, then kept deferring it.
• They landed somewhere better. Give the models enough context, screenshots, and images, and you don't need the panel.
• The annotation feature lets you click on an element and say rewrite this copy, make it super bold. You send it off and the model handles it.
• The result is a web designer imbued in the product that absorbs your intention and turns it into the output.

"I would say the biggest difference is the output. You're probably going to get more tests than you ever wanted. You're probably going to get way more code coverage, way more functionality. But the thing that hasn't changed is what to focus on and how to actually mold it. I think that's something that still benefits experienced builders. If you have a very strong vision, if you have all that track record of building products, that's where AI can really help you."

"At Webflow, we focused on one persona. That persona was this freelance web designer, just like there's probably only 50,000 of them, honestly. With Ploy, we're essentially solving for tens of millions of people. And I think that's a really interesting thing now that you can do with AI. And we've talked about boiling the lakes, the oceans. This is very much a boil the ocean type of thing. You couldn't do this before, but now you can do it. And you can do it to a sort of award-winning degree.

You know, I've been in tech since 2006, like 20 years. And when cloud computing came out, it was like, oh, this is revolutionary. I've got untapped compute, networking, storage. And now, as of a couple years ago, there's this new primitive of intelligence. It's just so irresistible to not build something in this space."

"I think the best analogy that I have for where we're at in the AI cycle is like Andy Warhol. He created paintings, but the stuff eventually ended up at a factory, and the factory would use machines to recreate these prints. But it's still Warhol. And I think that's where we're at, which is these models, they are essentially the factories for human creativity. And that's essentially what I want to be able to deliver for digital marketing."

• Ploy's lookbook is a curated collection of cool sites, the ploy agent then draws "inspiration" from those
• You won't get a site that copies the lookbook exactly. You get the vibe of those sites.
• This mirrors how good designers work. A few invent something fully original, but most pull inspiration from what's already out there. Ploy emulates that to make unique layouts that stand out.
• Enough context and data overwhelm the models' default predilections. Left alone, they keep reaching for the same tells, like the left-hand layout with rounded corners.
• Web design is full of AI tells. Ploy can't kill every one through prompts, guardrails, and steering, but it spends heavy effort cutting them.
• The goal is to let the essence of the person and the business's bespoke brand show through instead of a generic AI look.

"There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture."

"""
We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under.

The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public.

The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need.

Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. One day, the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark.

And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.
"""

"A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person"

"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy."

"How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?"

"Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable"

"for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."

"In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another."

“During that year, and especially in the winter months, he found himself returning more and more frequently to such a state of unreality; at will, he seemed able to remove his consciousness from the body that contained it, and he observed himself as if he were an oddly familiar stranger doing the oddly familiar things that he had to do. It was a dissociation that he had never felt before; he knew that he ought to be troubled by it, but he was numb, and he could not convince himself that it mattered. He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.”

Stephen Cohen on what Palantir looks for when hiring

• Three traits matter: the highest concentration of talent possible, long-term time horizons, and generative personalities.
• Talent first shows up as confidence facing whatever problem it's aimed at.
• The deeper signal is gracefulness in the execution.
• Graceful people add clarity: they clarify the structure of both the problem and the solution.
• Algorithm problems make this easy to see because they're well-constrained but hard.
• The same test works in sales and engineering. A good salesperson can lay out the actual problem, the ground reality, what they were trying to accomplish, and what they got right or wrong.

Long-term time horizons matter

• Talent alone won't build lasting value unless someone actually wants to work on the same thing over time.
• It's self-directed. Some people get satisfaction from solving a handful of problems over the long haul; others jump from thing to thing and never stick.

Generative personalities

• You can be talented with long time horizons and still be the type who uses it mostly to explain why ideas won't work.
• Some professors do exactly this: quick to show why something is silly, hesitant to construct.
• Startups run on momentum, so you want that talent and focus pointed in the most creative, energetic, constructive direction possible.

the world is way more malleable than you think. And if you just pursue something with a lot of maximum effort, drive, and energy, the world will recalibrate around you easier than you think