Todd Hoff

"Carey is pioneering a new business model for music. She’s cutting deals with the kind of partners musicians have traditionally shunned, pushing herself into new areas such as publishing, tourism and food and drink. … “A lot of big powerful music-industry executives made a giant mistake,” she says. “They gave the music business away on the internet. If they had just sat back and said, ‘Maybe let’s figure this internet thing out, it could be something cool,’ we could have found a way to distribute music online on our own terms, not somebody else’s. … Musicians have long promoted non-music products. The Rolling Stones marketed Windows 95 with Start Me Up. Michael Jackson did endless Pepsi promos. And rappers such as P Diddy and Jay-Z have moved on from name-checking other people’s fashion and luxury-goods brands in their songs to create their own brands, usually in partnership with their record labels, and promote them instead. But Carey is breaking new ground in three areas." - Todd Hoff

Live and die by the API - Todd Hoff

"The lipophobes hold the hypothesis dear that saturated fat causes heart disease. When the data began to surface that the French eat tons more saturated fat than do Americans yet suffer only a fraction of the heart attacks, the French Paradox was born. Nothing wrong with our hypothesis, it’s just those pesky French people who are somehow different. It’s a By God paradox, that’s what it is." - Todd Hoff

Stylistic Techniques: Repetition, Repetend, Sentence Fragment, Labyrinth Sentence, Orthographic Variation, Double Voice, The List, Crot. Crots anticipate hyper text style writing by a number of years. A crot: should be able to stand alone, making a point all by itself, and a series of crots would have a culminating effect. Think of it as a verbal slide show. - Todd Hoff

It's been organically retweeted in other words. - Micah Wittman

They just tell us how to write and like robots, I at least, sucked it up without thinking, even though I remember looking at those red corrections on my papers thinking they seemed arbitrary and didn't make much sense. I guess I was right. - Todd Hoff

There is also an emphasis on aphorisms over periodic sentences. It's as if every tweet is implicitly a link to the backgrounder explaining the context. I certainly suffer from this. - Todd Hoff

The other problem with web writing, a problem I certainly have, is the modern focus on clarity above all else. Language is drained of life and style because we need to be to the point, clear, bullet pointed. People don't like writing because all the fun has been taken out. Writing should be like your clothes style, you create a style that fits you, that communicates the essence of what it means to be you. Instead everyone is supposed to write the same way with same goal in mind: clarity. - Todd Hoff

To read Shakespeare in the original Klingon would be worth it. - Todd Hoff

There's something he loves more than money: his record, winning the most games of any NBA coach. He's 20 something games away. Tantalizingly close. This is your leverage. Threaten to fire him now unless he negotiates a small parting gift and agrees to leave. If you fire him he will never get his record because nobody will hire him again. You'll be on the hook for his full salary but you are anyway. He'll have to make a calculation, do you have the stones to fire him versus the risk of not getting his record, a record he's worked a life time for. It's now are never. You control something he wants. The team sucks, the best players want to leave. If you don't act you'll continue sucking and you'll end up paying him full boat. - Todd Hoff

"The point is that there's often an indefatigable gap between the rigors of cost-benefit analyses and the emotional hunches that drive our decisions. We say we want to follow the evidence, but then the evidence rubs against a bias like loss aversion, and so we make an exception. We'll follow the evidence next time." - Todd Hoff

"But here's the worst part: even terrible expert advice can reliably tamp down activity in brain regions (like the anterior cingulate cortex) that are supposed to monitor mistakes and errors. It's as if the brain is intimidated by credentials, bullied by bravado. The perverse result is that we fail to skeptically check the very people making mistakes with our money. I think one of the core challenges in fixing our economy is to make sure we design incentive systems to reward real expertise, and not faux-experts with no track record of success. We need to fund scientists, not mutual fund managers." - Todd Hoff

""The way the App Store is set up, it's very difficult to invest the time to develop a deep application," Kafasis told Ars. "So, developers don't put any depth into their products; you get one-offs, a single feature essentially."" - Todd Hoff

"So I started thinking about things that I think are awesome, or miraculous, and for me, it kept coming back to scale and complexity." - Todd Hoff

One of the most common principles is KISS - keep it simple stupid. People like saying it but there's really no way to define it, people don't agree on it, and there aren't rules for producing it. But I like this gloss on KISS. The kicker of course is what is obvious and what is meaningful is where the art is. - Todd Hoff

Law 1: Reduce, Law 2: Organize, Law 3: Time, Law 4: Learn, Law 5: Differences, Law 6: Context, Law 7: Emotion, Law 8: Trust, Law 9: Failure, Law 10: The One - Todd Hoff

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful. - Todd Hoff

This is immature male energy lashing out as way of expressing itself and trying to make everything right. Talking to Linda about this was interesting. She just can't understand little boys while I understood perfectly what he was going through. It doesn't completely go away, this impulse to act out. That's why I'm glad they didn't end it with a comfy ending. Mom showed infinite love and patience. He realized he needed mom, but didn't make a promises about never doing it again, because that wouldn't be true. Worth seeing. It may not be what you expect. And that's good. - Todd Hoff

Thanks. I like it when I'm still puzzling over a movie many hours after its end. - Todd Hoff

Awesome rant. Agree with 90% of it. - Todd Hoff

"Imagine a world where all computer programs can automatically learn to adapt and customize to our personal information needs. We all want to make informed decisions about how to spend our time and money, but there are simply too many options or too much information for us to efficiently process." - Todd Hoff

We have ~30K genes fruit flies have ~20K. You won't find our uniqueness in our genes because we are made of the same stuff. We are like other animals. Human females synchronize their periods to the socially dominant female just like hamsters do. It's all done with olfaction and pheromones. We are basic off the rack mammal. We have the same building blocks and plumbing, humans use these parts in unprecedented and unrecognizable ways. In some ways we are unique. Humans for example have unreproductive sex and talk about it after. We are not the only tool users. We aren't the only species that kill or exhibit organized violence. No precedent for causing violence at a distance. Not the only species with a theory of mind. No other has a secondary theory of mind, that we understand that other people have information we don't have. Other species also follow a version of the golden rule and exhibit empathy. We are different because we feel empathy for other species and even depiction of other... more... - Todd Hoff

Most defining characteristic of humanity: Gaining the strength and will to do X from the irrefutable evidence that X cannot be. The previous section is standard Sapolsky, this bit is new. We can hold a contradiction in our head and the very fact that it's a contradiction is what gives it power. A nun ministering to death row inmates: the less forgivable the act the more you must forgive... more... - Todd Hoff

Does this apply to social media too? "But these people [other writers] are not my core friends. I believe it's because we are competitive with each other. I want to write better than they do and I want to scoop them and I want people to like me more. I'm really immature. I'm also really competitive. I like being competitive. I get a rush from being competitive. And those things get in the way of intimate friendships with people just as competitive as I am who happen to be in the same business I'm in." - Todd Hoff