Hello dear reader, welcome to another quarterly edition of Occasion: projects, writing, reads, music, and life.

There's a lot in here… Feel free to skip around.

By the way, I'm Rosano from https://rosano.ca — if this isn't for you, there's a one-click eject button below; no hard feelings.

Comforting to be in Berlin again, even if it's the "worst weather of the year". I know lots of people here and feel it's more conducive than many places to the kind of life I enjoy.

After some months in Portugal of checking out places to settle long-term, my partner and I are seeking rest and familiarity. It was 'only' two cities but somehow felt like lots of moving around and figuring out how a new place works; I might be discovering that I now need at least three months in a place to feel relaxed. Still considering to try the same with France later.

Over the holidays, I rabbitholed on family tree data visualization and made some cool designs that I'll be proud to share soon.

I find myself reflecting on the connections between business, marketing, helping people, pedagogy, sustainable project work, and how I might incorporate these layers together in a way that's aligned with my values.

Last year, I might have spent half my time on private projects, so I'm looking forward to more public things. This year will mark twenty years of the rosano.ca domain name so I'd like to do some looking back as well as finally get to a newer homepage concept that reflects my current perspective.

My iOS apps are on the App Store again; if you ever wanted to have sonogrid or the others, now might be a good time to get a copy.

Everything still works great and I've never stopped using them.

I released a notepad you can't edit and made it interoperable with some existing to-do apps. I'm really drawn to cultivating more of these 'bridges' with stuff that's already around.

with Mauricio from Oxford, England

teach to save time

Help them learn faster and skip unnecessary steps.

communicating with body moves

One person unable to explain, another unable to understand.

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with Heddi from Berlin, Germany

scrolling choices

"I touched the phone for some specific reason an hour ago and didn't do that yet."

Aural / Vibrations

public space in Berlin

Public sofas… Why not?

work, then don't

No computing after lunch. Shower thoughts for the whole afternoon and evening.

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year thirty-seven

Focus, reps, optimistic vortex, strong signal, ripple effects.

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bringing lyrics home

From 'trapped in my notes' to 'public data' that anyone can use.

articles

Destigmatize being dumb

Any system that rewards finding flaws will improve. Apple, Google, etc will pay you a lot of money if you can find a security flaw in any of their systems. The military does this with matters of life & death (if admitting failure is punished, people hide failure). If you find an inefficiency in the economy, you can make a lot of money fixing it (through betting on the stock market, or starting a business).

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Jackson Kiddard

Anything that annoys you is teaching you patience.

Anyone who abandons you is teaching you how to stand up onyour own two feet.

Anything that angers you is teaching you forgiveness and compassion.

Anything that has power over you is teaching you how to take your power back.

Anything you hate is teaching you unconditional love.

Anything you fear is teaching you the courage to overcome your fear.

Anything you can’t control is teaching you how to let go.

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Confessions to a data lake

When advertising comes to AI assistants, they will slowly become oriented around convincing us of something (to buy something, to join something, to identify with something), but they will be armed with total knowledge of your context, your concerns, your hesitations. It will be as if a third party pays your therapist to convince you of something.

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A Fun Product Business for People Who Love Their Community

[Create a pocket-sized 'community passport' that's valid for one year with offers from at least 20 participating local businesses in a specific niche (like coffee, ice cream, beer, books, music) and price it at $1 per business; promote to local community groups and media or influencers in that niche.]

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How we grade presentation night

[We can grade them as "learned something new", "knew this but enjoyed it", or "unknown"; "unknown" is not bad and not a property of your talk: it has to do with the relationship between your talk and the receiver."]

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How to quit Spotify

In 2024, Spotify stopped paying artists for songs that had fewer than 1,000 streams, despite the fact that 81% of musicians on the platform don’t cross that threshold.

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A Gentle Introduction To Learning Calculus

Math and poetry are fingers pointing at the moon. Don’t confuse the finger for the moon.

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Observations on 6 years of journaling

["Rubber-ducking" is a programming term referring to people solving their own block by explaining it to another person; the lister can be replaced with a rubber duck.]

my journal is my rubber duck.

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Perverse incentive

[The owner of eyeglass e-commerce store DecorMyEyes found that online complaints put his site at the top of Google searches. He then responded to bad reviews with insults, threats, and other harassment to continue ranking high.]

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LLMs are coherence engines, not truth engines

[LLMs generate coherence more than truth, with] no access to the world, no sensory grounding, no lived experience, and no intrinsic way to check correspondence between its outputs and reality.

[The same is true of humans, as we] construct narratives, causal explanations, identities, and moral frameworks that hang together, rather than ones that are objectively correct. [We tend towards] narrative consistency, social acceptability and reinforce biases based on beliefs.

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Bufferland

To countless low-wage employees across the world, low-cost products will seem attractive - even ‘liberatory’ - but, when you zoom out, they are the ones cheaply producing the cheap things that are being sold back to them.

[In business models squeezing both customers and employees, senior management plays them against each other as enemies.]

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Smartphones and being present

if you're trying to lose weight, you shouldn't carry cookies around in your pockets. And my phone is the bag of cookies in this metaphor.

projects

Daily Bread

Visual diary of what kids eat in different parts of the world.

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Polarized Words

Enter 2 or more words to see their relative distances to the concepts of "good" and "evil".

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Franz

Open-source alternative to Beeper which makes much code available but not their main client.

[supports] Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, Skype, Zendesk

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Feed me up, Scotty!

RSS feeds for arbitrary websites, using CSS selectors.

talks

Arbeit, Lohn, Profit

[Workers have been convinced to put their savings in pension funds that invest in the stock market, which in turn puts more pressure on workers to perform better; this also shifts responsibility for a social system into the private realm.]

[Businesses are fundamentally political communities, no different from any other pooling of resources to achieve a collective goal.]

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Joshua Maponga: How to Decolonize Africa’s Systems

[Before school, identify problems in your community. Study them in school and find solutions. Develop a proposal and business plan. After graduating, return to your community and solve those problems.]

[We plant coffee, which we can't eat, then export it to earn money that we can use to buy food, rather than simply planting food we can eat.]

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What does it mean to be seen, all the time, by everyone?

[We are not individuals or ever alone: just the current contact point into a community.]

[Act in ways that would fill the healthiest people you know with pride.]

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On motherhood

[Just as you find your footing, they start to change. I swear she grows with each blink.]

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Let's talk about a Christmas Carol and its lessons....

[The systems and experiences that shape people can explain them without excusing them.]

If you refuse to examine how you became who you are, you'll mistake your coping mechanisms for virtues.

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Why Nobody Can Afford Canada Anymore

[Canada wasn't hit as hard during the 2008 financial crisis but printed money and lowered interest rates anyway. This funneled too much investment into real estate and enabled housing prices to continue inflating for another decade or two.]

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Puppy Wisdom, if we can hear it.

[When a baby dog bites, it can be painful but also totally normal. Why can knowing this give me so much patience towards an animal, yet I take it so personally when my partner does something which hurts? Getting hurt and processing it together can also be a normal part of relationships, and you can't have one without the other.]

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It's Not Just You: Music Streaming Is Broken Now

[Artists on Spotify are paid from a common fund divided in proportion to their number of streams in each payment period. Audiobooks are also sharing from the same pool. Scammers can flood the platform with fake plays that reduces the payout from all the others.]

[Anyone can upload tracks to even verified pages for independent artists because there isn't much vetting on the distributor or platform side and the cost is almost negligible.]

technical

Slow social media

pagination is more humane than infinite-scroll since it gives users a natural breathing point where they can decide whether they want to keep going

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Move your FOSS project to an org!

[When you're the only owner of the repository, people are] more likely to see you as the (only) person responsible for fixing things when they break, or reviewing external contributions.

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Open Social

Open social frees up our data like open source freed up our code. Open social ensures that products can get a new life, that people can’t be locked out of what they have created, and that products can be forked and remixed. You don’t need an “everything app” when data from different apps circulates in the open web.

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Interfaces are languages

Look at any modern software application: buttons are verbs, boxes with drop-shadows are nouns, API requests are grammatical structures. We’re not “using” interfaces so much as speaking them. When you pick up a new piece of software you can usually operate it but you lack fluency, you’re still learning the dialect.

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Too much time on your hands

[Inventing your own module instead of using a pre-existing one increases your maintenance work down the line as well as the learning curve for new contributors who need to get acquainted with non-standard tooling.]

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Fallacies of distributed computing

1. The network is reliable;
2. Latency is zero;
3. Bandwidth is infinite;
4. The network is secure;
5. Topology doesn't change;
6. There is one administrator;
7. Transport cost is zero;
8. The network is homogeneous;

projects solve the creator's need.

products are the intersection of the creator's capacity to build a solution, solving other people's needs, and their means to compensate the work. no intersection, no product.

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[I appreciate that they shared this in a public space and not via direct message or email because it enables others who might find the information useful to discover it.]

[Direct messages can contribute too, but the risk is higher that no one will see it.]

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learning and teaching are two sides of the same coin, so caring or not caring about one implies the same about the other

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Choosing to 'skip over parts' is reading because reflects a choice about what's being processed.

If I've absorbed something through my own lived experience or heard of it in another context, I'm still "reading" the idea as I recognize it well enough to skip over.

Cultural or self-inflicted frowning upon 'screens causing us to skim rather than read' creates pressure to do things 'properly', but comparisons are not relevant: set your own objectives and make your own meaning.

Skipping is about feeling when you're not connected so that you can move to yes.

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The average entrepreneur faces mild shame and maybe bankruptcy proceedings if their venture doesn’t work out, but even then they tend to maintain strong networks, saved money and cultural clout.

A person who takes really hardcore risk might face starvation, destitution or deportation if their gamble doesn’t work.

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technical or nerdy ones mind might enjoy "reading the docs/spec/manual" while everyone else looks for "show me how to be amazing"

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[All communities need a mind programmer they trust. Today we call it "memetic engineer", "influencer", or "political leader", whereas before it was "priest" or "shaman".]

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"who can benefit while this is incomplete?"

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a bridge goes both ways

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The Left looks for traitors, the Right looks for converts.

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nobody can take away your files

Listen as a distraction-free playlist, without accounts or sign up.

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Filó Machado: FÉ CEGA / FACA AMOLADA

pure musicianship with mostly guitar, beatboxing, and vocal rhythmics leading to some very happy music; complex harmonies remind me of Toninho Horta and Jacob Collier (especially the changing shirts).

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Mestre Gato Preto: The art of the berimbau

mostly berimbau without singing, solo and with the drum section, great swing

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Simon Stuij: Alles Raakt Mij

tight drumming, nice contrast between sections

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breathe.: London

would love to know the genre that is named for this chord progression.

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Maribel La Canija: Mediterráneo

many 'typical/cliche' progressions but nice surprise resolutions, crunches, and resolutions. timefeel includes triplets. bass solo has this "suspended in the air" feeling i tend to seek out.

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KNOWER: It's All Nothing Until It's Everything

deadly intricate rhythmic precision juxtaposed with smooth flowing head-banging melody.

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I love receiving music by the way; be welcome to send me recommendations anytime, anywhere!

That's all for now.

Feel free to reply and share your reflections, or just say hello.

Thanks for reading, and see you next time 👋🏼.

Hello dear reader, is this thing on? It's been a while.

In case you might not remember, I'm Rosano from https://rosano.ca — you might have signed up from one of my various projects or newsletters.

I'd like to try something new here and hope you'll enjoy it, but if it's not your thing there's a one-click unsubscribe link below; no hard feelings.

I'm motivated to start a newsletter again, after being out of it for some years, and mix the approaches I've tried so far.

Currently feels fun to try quarterly (Occasion-al) updates about things I've experienced, published, or encountered; it's inspired by a private one from Nathan Hewitt, as his seems to be about connection and a kind of life and online digest.

From publishing Ephemerata, I learned that I enjoyed the sharing, ritual, and weirdness—as did other people—but weekly is too much for me, and maybe monthly too.

My posture has shifted from "I should take as little space as possible because I'm probably not worth your time" to "I'd like to connect regularly with people who like what I'm doing, want more, and expect the unexpected".

Would also be nice to have one newsletter for a change and not several. Perhaps the nature of a secular church is that it serves many interests unevenly at different times, but remains worthwhile for all.

If you'd like to join me, read on. There's a lot in here; feel free to skip around.

Last time I felt online like this was in 2022.

Since then I've been mostly doing Strolling and Vibrations videos featuring conversations and music, respectively.

The visual/emotional media format is something I had rejected for years prior, preferring the written word for various reasons, but I think I'm finding another voice in video which, although probably secondary to my writing one, is meaningful to me; I'm grateful that it has given me a way to connect via "Internet stuff" with people outside my tech bubble.

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My plans for 2024 sort of didn't happen since my father passed away. It's been quite a journey to experience everything involved with that. I find myself only now having space again to pick up where I left off.

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I'm currently in Porto with my partner to research affordable places to settle in Europe. Portugal seems to have many places that could fit our street rat backpacker lifestyle, but France or Germany are also interesting, as I have more friends and connections there.

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After spending too much time this year concentrated on administrative things, I'm finally able to make some much-needed progress on my projects.

I've been waiting for years to make a better homepage, as I increasingly sense the present one doesn't sufficiently represent what I do. Currently doing some very satisfying work to put all my publishing together inside Journal.

There are Strolling conversations from 2023 that I wasn't able to edit in 2024. I want to get to each of them at some point, but it's a slow process as I still haven't managed to delegate this or get other people involved. I might accept that it's my work to do and be content that it takes the time it does.

I've recently published conversations with:

Nathan from NYC, USA

baking for neighbours

“There’s no negative side effects to this, except maybe you have too many sweets.”

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waiting for likes

“Hours of my life were being pulled into this thing that did not serve me.”

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complex complicated people

People we know are complex and complicated, but somehow those we don’t are simple.

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Neil from Kingston, Canada

working in prison

What kind of environment does it breed when we hire people to watch other people do time?

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Vashima from Indore, India

not one truth

With as many points of view as there are people, how deeply are you listening?

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life without burnout

Everything feeds you when you’re loving it.

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I estimate each conversation takes me about a week to produce, to include importing, uploading, listening, marking sections, editing snippets, exporting, and publishing on various platforms; sometimes I record an intro and outro to add context that might not be obvious from the exchange itself.

Lot of work actually… If I finish 1.5 per month, I'll be done with my backlog in about 2 years!

If you've appreciated the fruits of this, consider sending me a gift. And thanks to Paul, David, and Holger for contributing each year 🫶🏼.

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Am I the only person on the Internet doing this kind of project? Please let me know about the others.

I've recorded a bunch of music in the last years and can finally see it on one page, which is important for me because the idea to even put them online was to have observe musical development over time.

So far, I'm most proud of my recordings for Bach's Prelude & Fugue no. 5 in D major and Paulo César Pinheiro's Toque de Angola.

I recently shared a small piano improvisation exploring simple percussive textures.

Hope to have more vibrations eventually.

don't fear the docs

I feel powerful, as if I can tackle anything. I can get answers by simply reading. I can just look at the code.

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bringing Vibrations home

It's a relief to sense the psychological impact of no platform, no ads, and no random obfuscation of my work.

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training versus time

What’s the difference between years passed and time trained?

Slowly returning to this thread, but don't have much to share yet.

Hopefully a new app coming soon.

Also trying to make sure what I do technologically is interoperable and that I don't fork the ecosystem.

I'm thinking again about ways to implement pointing at the wrong thing and GitHub as storage so that people can make dinky little web apps to do fun things with public data. If you have technical expertise, I'd appreciate tips on a safe way to store OAuth tokens such that the server administrator can't read them; this might be an important piece of my solution.

articles

I’m joining a16z

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.

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The Hero as Flexible Bureaucrat

“I’d bend the rules too, if I knew it would save millions of lives”. Yes sure of course so would I, but would you bend the rules to save someone an hour of unnecessary paperwork? Knowing that if your boss found out he might use it as a pretext to fire you? That’s the kind of subtle, small-scale heroism that, repeated millions of times, creates a more humane society.

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My first open source psyop - postmortem

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

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When are you leaving?

There is a place beyond words and beyond understanding; don’t run away from it. When you rest in it, not knowing is knowing. Good is bad. Right is wrong. I am you. The space between objects shrinks to nothing. To grasp it, let go. To control it, surrender. To succeed, fail. To know, don’t.

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Zero-sum Thinking and the Labor Market

The only reason I got my chance - a truly lucky break - was because people bet on me. A computer would have instantly rejected me because I didn’t meet some arbitrary qualification. AI has spurred us right into the depths of what David Brooks calls the rejected generation - endless nos from platforms that are meant to serve as human interfaces (slot machine grabs across dating, investing, and now jobs), but really end up dehumanizing the whole process.

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The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction

we have a world where friction gets automated out of experiences, aestheticized in curated lifestyles, and dumped onto underfunded infrastructure and overworked labor. The effort doesn’t disappear; it just moves.

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The Technium: Better Than Free

[When copying makes things free and infinite, 8 ‘generative’ values that people might pay for include: immediacy; personalization; interpretation, support, or guidance; authentic versions; easy access on multiple devices, and backup; physical representations or in-person events; appreciation through patronage; discoverability and distribution.]

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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.

talks

The Most Valuable Bit of Information You Wish You’d Known Sooner

[Forms of leverage to gain more output from your input: labour (from employed, to self-employed, to employing), media (made once, licensed infinitely), capital (no need to sacrifice time), technology (build once, many people use it); stack different forms together.]

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The Money Expert: “Do Not Buy A House!”

[Whether I’m feeling good, I show up. When I’m feeling bad, I still show up. That’s the rep.]

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

[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.]

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Men & Grief

[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.]

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CONSPIRACY

[Nudging people towards your conclusion while making them think they arrived there themselves will keep them resistant to questioning their basis for belief.]

[‘Is it possible that…’ has a very low barrier for proof.]

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Who do you trust (when you don’t trust the news)?

[If manufacturers of cars bear some responsibility for your private vehicle’s safety issues, as airplane manufacturers would if flights put people in danger, perhaps so should social media companies for presenting alternative realities that lead to real world catastrophes.]

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Why You’re Thinking About Unemployment Wrong

[The economy is what enables masses of people who don’t know each other to coordinate and push the possibilities of society.]

projects

One Pot Pony

A lazy person’s guide to delicious meal prep

This is the power of Combinatorial Cooking. From a seemingly limited set of base ingredients, there is a whole universe of food options you can prepare quickly and easily.

The wok lets you boil, saute, stir-fry, and simmer. The spaghetti spoon lets you stir, mix, scrape, and mash. They’re both incredibly versatile and easy to clean. It’s all you need to make any Combinatorial Cooking recipe. Plus, using a wok makes you look and feel like a real chef, that’s just science.

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is it really FOSS?

[Seeing whether projects are as open-source as advertised.]

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About Feeds

[Friendly explainer and guide to getting started with RSS feeds.]

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32-Bit Cafe

You’ve just made a website, but now you’re unsure where to go from here. Here are some ideas for things to add and techniques to learn.

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About Ideas Now

Find people to talk to or collaborate with by searching across the /about, /ideas and /now pages of 6692 personal websites.

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Entropy Piano Tuner

David Braid told me he uses this open-source software to tune pianos in the following way:

1. Play each note to calibrate.
2. Let the software analyze and then you can preview with MIDI.
3. Adjust each string until the feedback shows a positive result.

“having a platform profile is like living in a single-room apartment, whereas having your own site is a castle with unlimited rooms.”

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i learn from everyone, but the teacher is myself

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composing (to place/put together) becomes necessary when you don’t have everything

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from observing what you see to observing how you watch

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mocking your opposition without reducing their power is not a flex.

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learn to teach so others can learn

Listen as a distraction-free playlist, without accounts or sign up.

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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.

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Jacob Collier: Fascinating Rhythm

One of his first popular videos, from 2014 yet doesn't feel dated.

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Louis cole: Palmdale Cruisin’

melodic phrasing feels vaguely baroque; harmonies make giant steps; solid groovy beat; bought this right away

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Brad Mehldau: The Greatest Jazz Pianist of Our Generation

[Written chord changes are an expedient way to quickly coordinate playing together, but they lack precision to specify things like voice-leading, even from more popular songs like Blackbird.]

[I like to add a note to so-called ‘stock voicings’ for crunch.]

[The intellectual aspect of improvising happens as you make sense of music. What happens in real-time while playing is a natural reflexive response based on everything you’ve learned.]

[Can you tell the same story with just two notes?]

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DOMi & JD BECK: SMiLE

catchy tune without words; complex drumming and rhythms but flows easy; video and imagery kind of absurd and hilarious with some famous figures doing a cameo.

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Nas feat. A Boogie Wit da Hoodie & YG: YKTV

Triplet tension in chorus; lyric flows while never mechanically aligning with the beat’s grid; bass triplets that happen a few times create a feeling of suspension; contrast between silence and full beat avoids monotony,

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I love receiving music by the way; be welcome to send me recommendations anytime, anywhere!

That's all I have to share for now.

How was it? Something missing or could be better? Feel free to reply and share any reflections you might have, or just say hello.

Thanks for reading, and see you next time 👋🏼.