[Test the market with these questions: 1. Have people asked for your help? 2. Are there enough of them willing to pay for your expertise? 3. Are other businesses serving the market but without your approach?]

Minha Velha: Capoeira Music Practice

Mixture of leading and harmonizing. Big sound with 7 people; sounds like there's more instruments than there actually are.

I'm joining a16z

Winning, for bloggers, means writing the reference take on a good topic. My favourite example of this is how Byrne Hobart broke out with his piece on the 30-year mortgage. It’s kind of surprising that this kind of post had such influence - it’s wonky, it’s not written for a general audience whatsoever. But it turns out that people think and talk about their mortgages a lot, and like to feel competent when they do. Reading that piece equips them with a kind of legitimacy to speak on the topic.

One lesson hiding in plain sight here is that most of the audience of any successful post does not actually read it. They are told it by someone who did read it. There’s a primary audience who carefully reads the piece and does the cognitive work of “restructuring their consciousness” (see Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy) around good writing. And then there’s a secondary audience, who are re-told the content, either verbally (including group chats, podcasts, Youtube) or in other oral formats like Twitter.

This is why, paradoxically, to reach the widest audience, you write to the narrow audience. Your objective as a writer is to give your primary audience material they’ll want to re-tell. They do the work of translating it to wider audiences in specific contexts; you do the general articulation in rich detail.

My first open source psyop - postmortem

[Information asymmetry is not only about lies, but whether someone can hear the correction or feedback.]

Capoeira Angola: Contra Mestre Gato Preto (GCFA) e Contra Mestre Reny (Oke Aro)

Seems like they escape so fluidly that they must stop to appreciate.

Mestre Gato Preto e CM Jorge

Crazy flying cartwheel at 5:50.

I'm starting a process to collect my online publishing across various platforms into one 'home'.

Music was the easiest to setup because it doesn't involve dealing with existing systems of mine.

You can see what it's like at rosano.ca/vibrations.

Vibrations

It's hard to have an overview on YouTube as they only order things by date upload, and also separate some videos into 'Shorts'.

By contrast:

1. I now have everything on one page,
2. videos are ordered based on my actual chronology,
3. and some even show the recording date.

It's crazy to perceive the psychological impact of no platform, no ads, and no random obfuscation of my work: I can browse and experience in peace.

metadata details

One thing I find cool is how I can derive the local time and place of any post with my travel data.

Every page also has a "Source" link to view the original file (like the one for this post). A reader can easily correct something, or add tags if it makes sense.

And the there are direct social media links saved from crossposting with n8n or manually.

One last detail is that I've mixed these with log entries to see them in a richer time context; see 2024 for an example of how this mixes together.

vibes

My inner librarian really gets excited by this sort of thing. I love information density, organizing things a certain way, and the potential to fill in more details as time goes on; I would like this site to become a very precise opinion about how that should be.

Might be worth mentioning that this is powered by Hugo, which seems to always have an elegant place for things to rest; I described some of the features I used on their forum.

It feels cool to see so many parts of fragmented systems coming together. With search engines becoming increasingly hostile toward finding things, these approaches remind me of older internetting ways: links that don't break, having multiple ways to discover things, openly accessible without ads, and maybe owning more of your data.

Ex-Google Officer Speaks Out On The Dangers Of AI!

[On our behalf, unelected Californians are making decisions about our collective future, justified through media and slogans.]

[Whereas having 50 extra IQ points in today's world makes a difference, a future where everyone can borrow 4000 will render everyone's baseline irrelevant, and therefore: 1. we are all effectively equal, and 2. we all become peasants to the 1% as the middle class vanishes.]

i learn from everyone, but the teacher is myself

Reflections on the social web

For many people, terms like ActivityPub, Fediverse, bridge, protocol, server, toot, boost, and Webfinger are alienating and confusing. They subtly imply that unless you understand what all these words mean, this might not be the place for you; in the same way crypto terms—blockchain, web3, wallet, keypair, nonce—are a wall of jargon that scream "you don't belong here" to normal people.

To send an email, you don't need to know what SMTP, IMAP, POP, DKIM, SPF, or DMARC are. To browse the web, there's no requirement to understand HTTP, DNS, servers, SSL, TTL, load balancing, or caches. The most significant impact these protocols have is perhaps that users never have to think about them.

grouping these together:

• military's "never give a command that won't be obeyed"
• teacher anti-pattern of "instructions that the student can't follow"
• basic-minded "using a foreign language to feel superior with someone who doesn't know it"

related to communication fails creating a false sense of authority and effectiveness. somehow everyone loses, but the speaker doesn't know.

Treinel Onça Branca (Ngoma) e prof. Negao (Capoeira sem fronteira)

Example of how someone with more experience can make it easy to play beautifully together.

The Shape of What You Meant

Over time, you start repeating yourself, rewriting the same paragraph for different people, reposting the same message in different groups, reframing the same problem with different jargon. And when something finally connects, it often feels like luck. Like you just happened to be visible at the right moment.

This is the system we pretend works: discovery as noise, identity as content, and visibility as a full-time job.

i continue to be blown away by local community centers all over the world and how they offer so much that isn't legible or relevant to technological systems – the underrated potential of not needing platforms to care for or live with your neighbours.

[Value means helping people. Giving more value means helping people more.]

[Features describe, whereas benefits are emotional.]

learn to teach so others can learn

254: Language Transfer with Mihalis Eleftheriou

[We tend to teach by showing but that's not always what's most effective; dogs and cats do that too. Sometimes it's better to explain with words what is helpful for the learner.]

[We're already translating thoughts into language.]

[Xenophobia that occurs naturally as a brain resonse needs help and solutions more than ostracizing, and learning the foreign language can be super helpful there.]

Dynamicland FAQ

A book cannot do something for you. Instead, reading a book can change you into someone who can do something for yourself. The role of a great medium is not to help people get things done, but to help people become deeper people — by providing a context in which they grow their skills and knowledge, broaden their context and perspective, and deepen their awareness and discernment.

whichever side you take, someone profits from the merch

Men & Grief

[All grief is one: like touching the ocean at any of the imaginary lines we've drawn, it's all one body of water.]

[When my partner senses that I'm holding back grief and invites me with a simple gesture like a hand on the shoulder, it's hard to meet them there but I try to anyway, because to say "no worries, everything's fine" would be to negate their good instincts for how I'm feeling.]

[I appreciate things that make me cry because they give me the chance to shed a few more of the tears repressed during childhood, when I had learned that doing so was dangerous.]

When does it make sense to focus on not liking someone's approach versus accepting and appreciating diverse ways?

[Journalism has a chance to present culture in a psychological order that helps us orient, but often submits to promotional calendars resulting in bestseller lists and cinema charts, as if popularity would be the most useful factor in making decisions.]

[Choosing of what we wish to be informed requires knowing ourselves well enough to not selectively ignore what we need; perhaps it's a position that could be prepared for with therapy.]

[Political news could draw us into how our society works and equip us to improve it intelligently. World news could humanize foreign cultures and add context beyond dramatic events to help break us from fixating too locally. Economic news could go beyond standard figures to instill understanding of the human realities behind our goods. Celebrity news could be refocused on people from who we can learn how to be better and realize our own talents. Disaster news could help us feel grateful for every pain-free moment. Consumer news could point us to what can help us live a more fulfilling existence.]

[As humans evolved from a time where not much would change, where when something that did might be important or deadly, we need to readjust our perceptions to clarify that what is novel is not always important.]

[We most desperately avoid introspection when forming awkward but vital ideas, and that's when the news grabs us.]

[Not everything we need to round ourselves out can be found in the present; for some perspectives we will need to look to the past for ideas that will still be in our thoughts tomorrow.]

[Children, wildlife, and heavenly expanse of the galaxies can give us relief from the news-induced self absorption that our time and moment is the most important.]

Art is a tool to help us with a number of psychological frailties which we would otherwise have trouble handling: our inability to understand ourselves, to laugh sagely at our faults, to empathize with and forgive others, to accept the inevitability of suffering without falling prey to a sense of persecution, to remain tolerably hopeful, to appreciate the beauty of the everyday and to prepare adequately for death.

Poncianinho’s Vlog 8 “Other Side”

[The sun made me want to practice.]

Capoeira Podcast

[Advice should be like snow: the more gentle it falls, the longer it stays.]

The road to mastery 1 by Mestre Poncianinho

[Learn to be comfortable with getting motivated to work when you plateau and not give up.]

[Scoping out a scene that isn't aware of itself.]

Cachila: Uruguay – Tambores del Candombe N° 2 (2009)

Pure vocal percussion, sometimes with actual drums. Can't help but solo or move on some of these explosive rhythmic drives. Some tracks fuse conversation, sound play, and humour.