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.]