Programmers From The United States

"The stock of the greatest company in the world is crap if every investor already thinks it is the greatest company in the world."

"A product lowers the cost of doing something and eventually, customers will figure this out and buy the stuff in big volume, but they're not going to buy yet. You've got to have real conviction to step up and own this kind of company-you're staring over the edge of the waterfall, not sure when the growth is going to start."

"Cheap power helped create a new market that didn't exist previously."

"Think about it- the King James Bible took religion out of the hands of the high priests and put it in to the hands of the people. An entire generation became literate just to be able to read the King James version of the Bible."

"High elasticity means that unit output goes up more than prices went down, so you get a growth business."

"But someone knew and made a killing. It was investing when you know something no one else knows."

"The stock market teaches you the hard way - it's all in the margin."

"It was what I didn't know about that always seemed more interesting."

"You invest in companies with great long-term prospects."

"When you think long-term, the edge is really investing because others can't know."

"When someone pukes up a stock, it's not hard to miss. Mispriced securities all over the table. And we are there with a barf bag, collecting all we can."

"You can't ever forget how precarious and humbling running money really is."

"Our portfolio was more of a Roach Motel-stocks came in and never left. This was exciting."

"But I was confused. Here we were scrambling around looking under rocks for great long-term investments, and every other hedge fund, or so it seemed, was doing some funny hedge of cheap yen money and T-bills. That's investing?"

"I think much of the conflict in the world is directly the result of people's varying interpretations of reality, or perhaps you could term it the "distortions" in their lenses. The best one can do is to try to consume as much knowledge as possible, both from your experiences, and from the words of others, in order to try to form a complete picture of the world."

"I love philosophy. It's fascinating to try to discover how perception, or experience, or memory works. I've always been a diehard relativist at heart, and I find it very interesting to read other people's philosophical ideas and how they see the world through their particular lens."

"A human is a complicated organic/electrical system, which is immersed in a culture. Try raising a monkey like a human, it won't work, you need the human's certain brain characteristics (including self-reflection) in order to create a truly intelligent creature. The brain processes inputs and perception in very particular ways, and I think until we understand the underlying processes better, there is no way to really simulate it in software. Computers will continue to be good at simplistic analysis, and raw processing power, but the subtlety of emotions is something intrinsic to the human organism and culture."

"The problem these days is again just the sheer amount of music available, and that music isn't as important an experience in people's lives in the 21st century as it was previously."

"If someone gave me a million dollars to run a music label, I would focus on creating a specific artistic point of view, and creating some channel to build a fanbase. Warp Records was a great example of a label that had a particular style, and many people would buy records just because the artists were associated with the label."

"Religion is a simplistic answer that society has created in order to make people feel better, but there is little evidence as to its validity. There are thousands of religions in the world, each with their own "correct" answers, and each contradicting each other. For now the most sensible explanation to me is that we are the result of a lucky combination of cosmic factors, we're the "mold" that has grown on this particular planet and in a universe as vast as ours, it's expected that somewhere this would happen."

"The usual problem with progressive rock is that the band can get so wrapped up in their own fantasy land that their music becomes completely inaccessible. "Wanky", if you will."

"I have a love for cheesy music. I don't want to list any bands and embarrass myself ;D"

"I think [Britney Spears] is a perfect example of an artificial construct -- someone with a decent voice and a very marketable image, that producers and business people turned into a pop star. Unfortunately, I think it took a toll on her, mentally, and I feel bad for the trouble that success has brought onto her. However, her music is pretty disposable, and she doesn't have the intelligence and cultural impact of someone like, say, Madonna."

"There may not be a high-level purpose for humanity, but that doesn't mean we can't find inspiration in the world. I think there is a combination of psychological and environmental factors that combine to create various urges in humanity -- most importantly the urge to create, to contribute something to the world, to express your personal worldview and see how the world responds. Art doesn't happen in a vacuum, and if it were only for personal gain then nobody would ever release music to the public. The process changes you, and also changes the world itself, creating ripples of inspiration which flow between the artist and the listener."

"So, if you played a C major chord to pretty much any person on the planet, they'd say that it sounds "harmonious" (or pleasing, or happy, etc, etc). But now when you want to put chords and melodies in an ordering and make a larger piece called a "song", then that is a much more difficult process, and gets very subjective. At that point, it's not just the chords, it's the lyrics, rhythms, instrumentation, tempo, intensity, any number of other things that goes into a song... so many variables that it's almost impossible to predict how a song will affect a given person."

"You could argue that there's maybe some mathematical interest in a Bach fugue, say, but the only thing that music does really well is "move" people -- make them feel something."

"Certainly there are songs out there that are massively popular, and you can use some reverse analysis to see how they're put together, but it's difficult to reliably engineer a "hit". Add to this the constantly swirling winds of cultural taste, and you can see that the music industry is more akin to playing the lottery than anything else. Having some talent or taste can give you a bit of an edge, but it's still a huge roulette wheel.."

"We started out in the middle ages creating music which had certain desirable physical properties (for example, a major chord sounds "nice" because the frequencies are in integer ratios to each other). And then as society evolved, we created these emotional contexts for certain instruments and progressions. Major-chord arpeggios sound "happy", minor chords sound "sad", chromatic scales can sound "scary", et cetera. In the 20th century, film soundtracks reinforced this point as people associated certain kinds of music with certain visual and emotional experiences. It's a giant feedback loop, really; once you grow up in a given culture, it leaves this musical fingerprint on you which colors your experiences."

"To impact someone emotionally, [a musical piece] has to contain "interesting" melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic content, and what defines "interesting" is up to the listener."

"Well, when music "moves" someone, it doesn't necessarily have to be in a positive direction. Some people certainly get moved by darker music, and there are all sorts of emotions which music can create that are interesting -- aggression, foreboding, anger, fear. Not everyone wants to feel happy all the time :)"

"I think we'll soon see a new breed of musicians who have both a modern chordal sense (jazz) and a high comfort level with synthesizers and new breeds of sounds (from the electronica/techno/dj scene)."

"Unfortunately Sting's jazz work isn't nearly as inventive as his rock songs."

"Music is nothing but ratios and harmonic math, anyways."

"A lot of my tracked music was written when I was very young, relatively speaking. I was very optimistic, I had finally discovered some sort of public musical outlet, it was generally a very happy time. So, the music of that time sort of reflects that, I think? By the time I started the Alpha Conspiracy project, I was older, a bit more sophisticated (and, well, cynical), and so the music got more complex."

"I'd like to see people try to sample the sound less and try to sample the style a bit more. Some people see this sort of 'copying' as offensive... I'm inclined to think the opposite - all music is built on imitation and expansion."

"If someone only ever listens to, say, Nickelback, their opinion [about music taste] is valid but largely meaningless since they don't bring any depth to the discussion :)"

"Sometimes if you polish too much, you rub off the shine."

"A lot of [my] songs have various strange oddities in them - usually this is the result of late-night dementia."

"Every musician, I guess, wants to alter the world to his or her taste in some fashion... That's part of why I write music."

"If I was obsessed with making money off of my music, I wouldn't have released it for free on the internet for the last 5 years."

"I'm much more into 'electronica' (yeah, I know it's cliche these days)."

"I try to avoid categorizing music as much as I can, though. Everyone steals so much from everyone else these days, the lines between genres are very washed-out."

"I think there are some objective [musical] qualities... how complex something is, how melodic, how diverse the tonality is, et cetera. But I could also make a piece of music that contains all of those and yet isn't "good" from a subjective viewpoint. For example, take Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", Beatles "Yesterday", and Underworld's "Born Slippy", and play them all on top of each other at the same time. Great music in their own right, but terrible sounding together."

"Unfortunately, as technology has improved, that which was 'underground' now heads towards obsolescence."

"I'm not a big fan of asynchronicity just for its own sake - a lot of people push rhythmic variation so far that the basic pulse of the music gets lost (and the listener is confused)."

"I think that the public judges a song on the overall feel, not individual samples. If a sample contributes too heavily to the song, and the sample is recognized, the opinion of the piece goes down."

"Stylistic evolution comes from listening to what other people have done and making a Darwinistic modification."

"It's hard to quantify a 'top ten' list of songs for many reasons. I like many styles of music, and it's difficult to compare radically divergent types of music with each other."

"Once you have a basic grasp of the theories underlying music, you can pretty much pick up any instrument you want."

"Silicon approaches certain fundamental limits; organic bliss is the soul catcher."